Biden says his family backs a potential presidential run, and he's close to deciding

Former vice president Joe Biden told an audience at the University of Delaware that he and his family were in the final stages of deciding whether to mount a presidential run.
Daniel Sato, The News Journal

The former vice president then addressed what many among the Delaware audience had thought – or hoped – he might: his presidential ambitions.

Biden said he has not yet decided whether to run for president, though he is close.

He revealed in detail how his family has expressed their support for a potential presidential run, but he must decide "whether or not I am comfortable taking the family through a very, very, very difficult campaign."

"The general election, running against President (Donald) Trump, I don't think he's likely to stop at anything," Biden said to a capacity crowd of 700 at the University of Delaware.

The longtime Delaware senator also said he has yet to decide whether he would be able to attract enough individual contributions to mount a campaign, whether support he sees in the public runs deep enough to lead to a victory, and how he may deploy resources onto social media platforms in what would be a "massive undertaking."

"I don't want this to be a fool's errand,” he said. "This alleged appeal that I have. How deep does it run? Is it real?"

At one point, a woman in the crowd yelled, "Oh, God, just say yes." Answering in a style that has become part of his political identity, Biden said he always means what he says.

"The problem is I sometimes say all that I mean," he said. “That’s as straightforward as I can be. I have not made the final decision."

The comments had been prodded out of Biden by author Jon Meacham, who was onstage with the former vice president at a University of Delaware conference hall to discuss his book, published last year, called "The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels."

It was the first event ever held at the newly named Joseph R. Biden Jr. School of Public Policy and Administration.

In an opening statement, Biden recalled advice he had received more than three decades ago from a former professor about running for elected office: "Remember what Plato said: 'The penalty that good people pay for not being involved in politics is being governed by people worse than themselves.' "

The significance of the comment from a potential presidential contender was not lost on the crowd, or on Meacham.

After Biden completed the opening remarks, the author turned to him and said, "I want to go back to that Plato thing.

While the theme was a direct allusion to Trump, Meacham argued that political divisiveness today is not unknown to the United States.

"From Reconstruction to the first Red Scare under Woodrow Wilson, from the rise of a new Ku Klux Klan in the early 20th century to the cataclysm of the 1930s, from Joe McCarthy to the backlash against civil rights, our national story is no fairy tale," he said.

Also lambasting the president's response to Charlottesville, Biden said Trump created a moral equivalency between people "chanting the same anti-Semitic bile that was chanted in the streets of Nuremberg in 1933" and those who oppose them.

"Has any president since the Civil War said anything like that?" Biden asked Meacham.

"No," the author and historian replied.

In the hours before the event, Biden made references that also appeared to indicate a distaste for Trump, who would be expected to be the Republican nominee in 2020.

Biden tweeted a photo of Meacham's book opened to a page scribbled with notes and underlined sentences.

"A president's vices and his virtues matter enormously," proclaimed one underlined sentence on the page.

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